


On a fait la guerre, on a fait la paix

by blacklaces



Series: Café Alrededor del Mundo [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Aftermath of Colonialism, American Civil War, Author's intense love affair with coffee, Author's intense love affair with food, Cafe du Monde, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Light Angst, Minor Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Multi, New Orleans, Post-Canon, Quynh & Booker's Excellent Adventure, The inherent healing power of comfort food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25540987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacklaces/pseuds/blacklaces
Summary: “It’s still early enough you know, that I have to check.” the driver says, turning on the left blinker.“Check?” Booker asks, his voice rough with the lack of sleep.“It’s a thing that happens in this city. You drive long enough, you pick up passengers that disappear."orQuynh and Booker in a New Orleans cafe.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko
Series: Café Alrededor del Mundo [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1846708
Comments: 47
Kudos: 313





	On a fait la guerre, on a fait la paix

**Author's Note:**

> On a fait la guerre, on a fait la paix- we made war, we made peace

Quynh’s execution of her master plan keeps getting pushed back by every cafe, patisserie, and hole-in-the-wall shop off two different side streets that Booker brings her to.

In Macau, she sneaks spoonfuls of Booker’s serradura long after she finishes her own portion. In Taipei, they sample coconut ice cream and handmade almond cookies, washed down with jasmine tea. In Hong Kong, she eats egg tarts so delicious she makes a mental note to leave the building, the family that owns it, and the whole city alone and under her protection. If Booker’s plan to save the world is to make her love it again, he’s on the right track. Honestly, she’s a little annoyed with herself because of how easily it’s working.

After sightseeing in the Dominican and linking up with the area’s smugglers (Quynh never made across the Atlantic before she was (un)ceremoniously dumped in it), Booker suggests North America. She doesn’t know if she could stomach it at first, after Japan, but she also knows his suggestions are made to keep them far away from the others. He gets updates from Copley, though Booker doesn’t seem to know that Quynh knows, and that's a merry game of chase all on its own. 

In New Orleans, he takes her to Cafe du Monde early enough in the morning that the sun is still beginning its journey across the sky, rays peeking out behind the rail stations and skyscrapers. It’s her first North American city. Booker mutters something about Louisiana and a wayward cannon when they step onto American soil, and mutters even louder when his shoe goes right into a puddle. Some things, Quynh thinks, shouldn’t be translated for propriety’s sake. 

Being immortal doesn’t heal tiredness, and the two of them are exhausted as they make their way out of the port. They sneaked on a fishing boat in some indiscriminate Dominican port sometime in the last 48 hours, hiding away through a fierce storm that rocked the boat with every clap of thunder.

(Quynh had stamped her panic down, trying to ignore the roll of the sea- she was the one who suggested the boat, she couldn’t be weak. At the apex of the storm's fierceness with the wind howling and the waves crashing, Booker’s hand had reached out and slowly, carefully, pulled her into the cage of his arms. When she glared at him, he was unapologetic.

“I’m afraid of storms.” He had said.

He was lying, and they both knew it, but at that moment Quynh hadn’t cared. She had gently placed her head down on Booker’s shoulder and stayed in that position for the rest of the trip.)

Now, all Quynh wants is a shower and a bed. Nonetheless, Booker grabs her hand and bundles her into a taxi, directing the driver to something called the French Quarter,  _ Vieux Carré _ . He murmurs to her that he hopes she doesn’t mind-the drive is a short one and their destination close- he’s too tired to walk. The drive is nice; the city is pretty as it passes them by. Quynh rests her head against the window, and Booker rests his against her shoulder. The driver is an older black woman softly singing along with the song playing on the radio (and that had been a trip and a half for Quynh. Music, wherever, whenever). She looks back at them through the rear-view mirror as if to make sure her passengers are still there. Quyhn raises her eyebrow at the woman. 

“It’s still early enough you know, that I have to check.” the driver says, turning on the left blinker. 

“Check?” Booker asks, his voice rough with the lack of sleep. 

“It’s a thing that happens in this city. You drive long enough, you pick up passengers that disappear. Some gentleman flags you down real nice and asks to go to one of the older neighborhoods, but he vanishes from the back seat without using the door and stiffs you on the fare.”

She slows down as they approach the crosswalk, and takes a sip of coffee from her styrofoam cup as she pulls up along the curb.

“It’s your first time here, isn’t it? Else y’all would have known about our ghost stories.” 

_ Ghosts _ , she thinks to herself.  _ What do these people know about ghosts?  _ Is she a ghost? Is Sebastien?

Booker chuckles. “Not my first time here, Madame, but it has been some time.” He hands her the money, crisp twenty dollar bills muted in the cab’s interior. “Keep the change.” 

When they exit the vehicle, Quynh hears a faint strain of unfamiliar music spilling out of the ironwork galleries that wrap around teal and coral buildings. The city is coming to life around them: residents out on their balconies in their brightly patterned robes, young women out walking their dogs with bright purple threading through their braids, and workers opening up shop for the day with their sleeves rolled up even in the chill. But it’s still early, and the sounds of morning still dominate the low hum of music and voices. It’s peaceful. It’s so different from anything she’s ever experienced before. Booker keeps a hold of her hand, half to direct her, half as if to keep her from killing anyone. Honestly, it’s like he thinks she’s going to snap at any second. She would never do anything without a plan, and if (when, she corrects herself) she does start killing, it’ll be maximum impact.

The probability of that  _ If  _ becomes smaller by the second. 

(The longer she’s with Booker, the more her resolve starts to fade, the harder it is to hold on her pain. Some moments, so caught up in just living again, she forgets what she was even planning in the first place. The longer Booker is with her, the more his smiles change from tentative to truthful. In one of his more unguarded moments, he reveals to her how it's now easier to go through the days now that he doesn’t dream of her. He looks stricken the moment it leaves his mouth, but Quynh understands. She can only imagine how alone her deaths made Booker feel.)

The amount of death she feels in this city is astronomical, and the layers peel back the longer she looks around the streets Booker guides her through- American to French to Spanish to French again, all built on the backs of enslaved people and stolen land. She wonders how much different Louisiana’s experience was from Vietnam’s- she feels a queer sort of kinship with the people of this city. Hemmed in by an all-powerful force of nature that winds its way past great oaks laden with Spanish moss and yet, a place that grows. After every knock, life continues and New Orleans rises up from its knees. She thinks the Big Easy is a bit of a misnomer. Nicol ò waxed poetry on Rome as the Eternal City while Quynh had made the case for Kyoto- she thinks New Orleans might have a fair shot at the title next.

The city is so young but, she supposes, it’s old to everyone else. New Orleans rose after she had already been in the sea for 60 years- how can anyone think this place is old? Andromache and her had lived and loved together for over a millennia before La Salle even thought to step foot in North America.

Past a square and a park, where the young artists setting up their easels painfully remind her of Yusuf, they reach what seems to be the edge of the city. An awning covered area of the cobblestones where tables are set up gives way to the crescent of the Mississippi river. In the byzantine market next to it, merchants are already hawking their wares. There’s a small crowd, but not enough to overwhelm her. They snag the table closest to the river where the sun bounces off the water’s surface. Booker orders them two drinks each, Cafe au Lait and orange juice, and 4 servings of Beignets. 

“Quatre?” She asks.  _ Four? _

“Oh,” he smiles, “I’m not sharing this time.”

The French-language music pouring from the speakers provides a gentle background noise. She thinks about what she read- the mix of French, Spanish, West African, Indigenous, and American influence. She thinks she would have liked to have seen it before it finished all coming together, she thinks that this would have been a good place to try and do some good.

Booker leans close to her, resting his arms on the table. “I wasn’t here when this place opened. We were still up north in ‘62- 1862- but we found this place when we came down near the end of the war in 1865. After years of fucking awful military coffee and half rations, this place was manna from heaven, even if most of the city’s confederate sympathizers were hostile and trying to kill us. At that point, I was- Dieu- I was still young. Young-ish. This place was my first experience with something that was both French and not. I hadn’t been to Morocco, or Algeria, Haiti, or Vietnam before here. I’d never seen what colonialism wrought. This was still early enough- in the life of New Orleans- that people still spoke French.” 

He gestures to the signage around them, all advertising for the French Market. 

“Now, you have to go out to the bayou to find it.”

Booker’s soliloquy is cut short by their drinks coming out. The orange juice placed down first, the coffee after it. It’s bisk out, but Quynh can see condensation beading on the outside of the glass of juice just as easily as she sees the steam coming up from the mug. The smell of the coffee is strangely similar to that of their coffee in Hanoi. Cautiously, she takes a sip.

“Chicoree?” she questions. 

“Chicoree. The city is called New Orleans-  _ La Nouvelle-Orléans. _ ” he croons. 

Booker’s French accent is so exaggerated that it startles a laugh out of her, bright and clear.

It draws the attention of the patrons sitting around them. She wonders about the picture they make- this young couple where the man is joyfully educating his companion on French colonial history and coffee in equal measures while she laughs on. She remembers, fondly, watching Nicolò and Yusuf doing the same thing a thousand ways and a thousand times across a thousand places. Yet Booker and her are only filling the gaps. Her for his wife, and him for Andromache.

It feels like betrayal, to love him as she did Lykon. But it’s not more than Lykon- it’s just different, just as is her love for Andromache. Lykon was the new growth of spring, easy to smile, easy to forgive. Booker is the Hellebore that blooms through the coldest days of winter. 

When the server brings their order out, Quynh almost misses the beignets under the mound of powdered sugar that sits atop them. Booker takes the plates and puts one plate in front of her and three in front of himself before falling prey to Quynh’s glare. Sheepishly, he pushes one of his plates across the table to join the one in front of her. 

For a moment she’s gripped so strongly by the memory of doing the same thing with Nicolò, with Yusuf, with  _ Andromache _ , that she can’t breathe. The very affection and love -familial and and romantic- that was absent from her for five hundred years is so encompassed in the motion that she chokes on it.

There, at 8:15 in the morning, in fucking New Orleans of all places, does Quynh cry for the first time since she clawed her way through the iron rust that kept her captive. She cries and cries until she can’t anymore, until the salt dries and cracks open on her skin and her eyes are drier than a desert. Their fellow patrons stare at her, at them, wondering how such a turn of emotion could happen so quickly. What could make a beautiful woman with a handsome man break down in tears in the City of a Million Dreams?

When she looks up she loses it, again, but in a different way.

Booker’s face is absurd. His look of panic at odds with the light dusting of powdered sugar that covers his mouth. Quynh gasps for air and her sobs turn into peals of laughter as she watches Booker scramble to try to come up with something, anything, to say. Eventually he gives up; he pushes both her untouched plates of beignets closer to her, and pours a liberal amount of whiskey in his coffee.

Later, after they’ve finished their beignets and ordered more drinks, another cafe au lait for Booker and hot chocolate for Quynh, does she break her silence.

“I think Sebastien, that I am almost ready to go home,” she pauses, carefully considering her next words, “and I think you are too.”

She thinks the sigh Booker lets out would be audible in Hanoi.

“Sainte Marie Mère de Dieu” he says reverently. “I thought I was going to have to clean up another massacre.”

-

Later, the bastard tries to ditch her in their hotel room that overlooks streets packed with partygoers. Something about how he still has to pay his penance, 99 years left and all. She strangles him with a pillowcase and, when he wakes, carefully tells him in no uncertain terms  _ (It isn’t up for fucking debate Sebastien!) _ , that he will be coming with her.

“It’s family Sebastien. We’re supposed to be together.”

And Sebastien is so, so gone on this woman. This warrior that tormented his dreams for 200 years. He’s seen her stab a Japanese policeman in an alleyway and almost choke on sushi in the same hour, and she’s so different from anything Andy or Nicky or Joe described yet exactly the same and her loves her in the way he loved his mother, his sister, his wife- the way he  _ loves  _ Andy and Nicky and Joe and Nile. He thinks he could stop wanting to die in this moment, if only to keep the light in her eyes. 

He knows that his time with Andy is limited, and he knows that Quynh knows that. The two of them, he thinks, are better off starting over than holding on. Sebastien will make up for what he’s done, he’ll watch football with Joe again, cook with Nicky, bring more baklava to Andy, teach Nile the crudest, funniest, and outdated French he knows-. He’ll make it up to his family, and he’ll start by coming home with Quynh. 

-

Even later, the two of them go to the oldest, out of the way shrimp shack they can find and spend the rest of the night stuffing themselves on fried okra, grits, slow cooked beef bits, and bowl after bowl of bananas foster. Quynh spent the last 500 years in a box, and Booker is unfortunately  _ French _ , and the two of them don’t know what half the things they order are. Frantic energy emanates from the revelry surrounding them and big brass music soars high above the trees, battling its way through the oppressive humidity that settled as evening shadows lengthened. She almost chokes on her food, doubled over with laughter while Booker regales her with some of his most outlandish stories from his time in the American South, from the 1860s to the early 2000s- about the beginning of the end of the French Creoles, the Italian neighborhoods, and the rise and fall of Bourbon street. 

It’s beautiful, she thinks, this glimpse of a joyful man shining through Booker’s hardened exterior, the man extolling happiness from dark times. She thinks, for all that he’s helped her, maybe it’s time for her to help him. They’ll reunite with their family, but there’s nothing wrong with taking a few more months to reach them. Earth-shattering revelation having happened, she needs time to prepare herself for seeing them all again, and Booker needs more time to heal his grief. After trying to die his whole life, he has as many difficulties as she does with trying to live.

She steals Booker’s phone when he goes up to get another pitcher of Sweet Tea and searches through his messages with Copley. Andy’s in Serbia with Nile, the baby immortal she has yet to meet, and Joe and Nicky are in Tunis. She thinks her and Booker’s own little duo can take their time in getting back across the Atlantic; she does like New Orleans. She saw an advertisement in the hotel directory for a place called the Banh Mi Boys and she’s curious what Vietnamese food in America is like.

**Author's Note:**

> The city of New Orleans was founded by the French in 1714- sixty years after Quynh was thrown into the ocean, but almost a hundred years prior to Booker becoming immortal. New Orleans' French traditions have been maintained (and transformed) by the city's African-American and French-Creole descendants, though few live in the French Quarter- one of the city's most expensive neighborhoods. The city has a very rich and complex history regarding race in America, and it's hard to do that justice when writing a French man and Vietnamese woman.  
> Cafe du Monde is a real cafe that is one of the top tourist destinations in New Orleans- I figured Booker would have a soft spot for it though because he was alive when it started.  
> Sainte Marie Mère de Dieu- Santa Maria Madre di Dio, but make it French.  
> In the end, I don't want prolonged strife, so I made these two happy (-ish).  
> Booker on immortality pre-meeting Quynh: 0/10, would not recommend.  
> Booker on immortality post-meeting Quynh: I mean it's still not great but at least I'm not having re-occurring nightmares? 6/10  
> As always, find me on tumblr at [Blacklaces](https://blacklaces.tumblr.com/)


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